Joe Goffman was fifteen years out from his sleepy hometown when he wrote Bush Falls, a searing critique of its people and institutions. The book was a runaway best seller, and led to an even more successful movie. Now, however, Joe's got a problem. His father has suffered a stroke, and that means that Joe has to go back to his birthplace after having successfully antagonized every person living there. Can Joe survive the reservoirs of hatred that have been waiting to pour down upon him? Just maybe.

Everything Changes

To all appearances, Zachary King is a man with luck on his side. A steady, well-paying job, a rent-free Manhattan apartment, and Hope, his stunning, blue-blooded fiancee: smart, sexy, and completely out of his league. But as the wedding day looms, Zack finds himself haunted by the memory of his best friend, Rael, killed in a car wreck two years earlier, and by his increasingly complicated feelings for Tamara, the beautiful widow Rael left behind.

How to Talk to a Widower

Doug Parker is a widower at age 29, and in his quiet suburban town, that makes him something of a celebrity - the object of sympathy, curiosity, and, in some cases, unbridled desire. But Doug has other things on his mind. First there's his 16-year-old stepson, Russ - a once-sweet kid who now is getting into increasingly serious trouble on a daily basis. And then there are Doug's sisters.

One Last Thing Before I Go

You don't have to look very hard at Drew Silver to see that mistakes have been made. His fleeting fame as the drummer for is nearly a decade behind him. He lives in an apartment building filled almost exclusively with divorced men like him, and makes a living playing in wedding bands. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter, Casey, has just confided in him that she's pregnant - because Silver is the one she cares least about letting down. So when he learns that his heart requires emergency surgery, Silver makes the radical decision to refuse the operation, choosing instead to use what time he has left to repair his relationship with Casey.

This Is Where I Leave You

The death of Judd Foxman's father marks the first time that the entire Foxman family - including Judd's mother, brothers, and sister - have been together in years. Conspicuously absent: Judd's wife, Jen, whose 14-month affair with Judd's radio-shock-jock boss has recently become painfully public. Judd joins the rest of the Foxmans as they reluctantly submit to their patriarch's dying request: to spend the seven days following the funeral together.

Domestic Violets: A Novel

Tom Violet always thought that by the time he turned 35, he’d have everything going for him. Fame. Fortune. A beautiful wife. A satisfying career as a successful novelist. A happy dog to greet him at the end of the day. The reality, though, is far different. He’s got a wife, but their problems are bigger than he can even imagine. And he’s written a novel, but the manuscript he’s slaved over for years is currently hidden in his desk drawer while his father, an actual famous writer, just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His career, such that it is, involves mind-numbing corporate buzzwords....

Pretty Is: A Novel

When precocious Lois and pretty Carly May were 12 years old, they were kidnapped, driven across the country, and held in a cabin in the woods for two months by a charismatic stranger. Nearly 20 years later, Lois has become a professor, teaching British literature at a small college in upstate New York, and Carly May is an actress in Los Angeles, struggling to revive her career. When a movie with a familiar plot draws the two women together once more, they must face the exposure of their secret history and confront the unspeakable truths that haunt them still.

Summerlong

One night Don, a father of three, leaves his house for an evening stroll only to wake up the next morning stoned and sleeping in a hammock next to a young woman he barely knows. His wife, Claire, leaves the house on this same night to go on a midnight run - only to find herself bumming cigarettes and beer outside the all-night convenience store. As the summer lingers and the temperature rises, this quotidian town's adults grow wilder and more reckless while their children grow increasingly confused.

Truth in Advertising: A Novel

Finbar Dolan is lost and lonely. Except he doesn’t know it. Despite escaping his blue-collar Boston upbringing to carve out a mildly successful career at a Madison Avenue ad agency, he’s a bit of a mess and closing in on 40. He’s recently called off a wedding. Now, a few days before Christmas, he’s forced to cancel a long-postponed vacation in order to write, produce, and edit a Superbowl commercial for his diaper account in record time. Fortunately, it gets worse....

The Wednesday Group

Gail, a prominent Boston judge, keeps receiving letters from her husband's latest girlfriend, while her husband, a theology professor, claims he's nine-months sober from sex with grad students. Hannah, a homemaker, catches her husband having sex with a male prostitute in a public restroom. Bridget, a psychiatric nurse at a state hospital, is sure she has a loving, doting spouse, until she learns that he is addicted to chat rooms and match-making websites.

Love May Fail: A Novel

Portia Kane is having a meltdown. After escaping her ritzy Florida life and her cheating pornographer husband, she finds herself back in South Jersey, a place that remains largely unchanged from the years of her unhappy youth. Lost and alone, looking to find the goodness she believes still exists in the world, Portia sets off to save herself by saving someone else - a beloved high school English teacher who has retired after a traumatic incident.

Among the Ten Thousand Things: A Novel

Jack Shanley is a well-known New York artist, charming and vain, who doesn't mean to plunge his family into crisis. His wife, Deb, gladly left behind a difficult career as a dancer to raise the two children she adores. In the ensuing years, she has mostly avoided coming face-to-face with the weaknesses of the man she married. But then an anonymously sent package arrives in the mail: a cardboard box containing sheaves of printed emails chronicling Jack's secret life.

The Other Child

Sometimes a lie seems kinder than the truth...but what happens when that lie destroys everything you love? When Tess is sent to photograph Greg, a high-profile paediatric heart surgeon, she sees something troubled in his face and feels instantly drawn to him. Their relationship quickly deepens, but then Tess, single mother to nine-year-old Joe, falls pregnant, and Greg is offered the job of a lifetime back in his hometown of Boston.

One Plus One: A Novel

Suppose your life sucks. A lot. Your husband has done a vanishing act, your teenage stepson is being bullied, and your math-whiz daughter has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that you can't afford to pay for. That's Jess' life in a nutshell - until an unexpected knight-in-shining-armor offers to rescue them. Only Jess' knight turns out to be Geeky Ed, the obnoxious tech millionaire whose vacation home she happens to clean. But Ed has big problems of his own, and driving the dysfunctional family to the Math Olympiad feels like his first unselfish act in ages...maybe ever.

Three Wishes

In this wise, witty, hilarious new novel, we follow the Kettle sisters through their 33rd year, as they struggle to survive their divorced parents' dating each other, their technologically savvy grandmother, a cheating husband, champagne hangovers, and the fabulous, frustrating life of forever being part of a threesome.

Big Little Lies

Pirriwee Public's annual school Trivia Night has ended in a shocking riot. One parent is dead. The school principal is horrified. As police investigate what appears to have been a tragic accident, signs begin to indicate that this devastating death might have been cold-blooded murder. In this thought-provoking novel, number-one New York Times best-selling author Liane Moriarty deftly explores the reality of parenting and playground politics, ex-husbands and ex-wives, and fractured families.

About a Boy

Will Freeman may have discovered the key to dating success: If the simple fact that they were single mothers meant that gorgeous women - women who would not ordinarily look twice at Will - might not only be willing, but enthusiastic about dating him, then he was really onto something. Single mothers - bright, attractive, available women - thousands of them, were all over London. He just had to find them.

Us: A Novel

Douglas Petersen may be mild-mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that seduces beautiful Connie into a second date...and eventually into marriage. Now, almost three decades later, they live more or less happily in the London suburbs with their moody seventeen year-old son, Albie. Then Connie tells him she thinks she wants a divorce. The timing couldn’t be worse. Connie has planned a month-long tour of European capitals, a chance to experience the world’s greatest works of art as a family, and she can’t bring herself to cancel. And maybe going ahead is for the best anyway? Douglas is privately convinced that this landmark trip will rekindle the romance in the marriage, and might even help him to bond with Albie. Narrated from Douglas’s endearingly honest, slyly witty, and at times achingly optimistic point of view, Us is the story of a man trying to rescue his relationship with the woman he loves, and learning how to get closer to a son who’s always felt like a stranger.

Inside the O'Briens: A Novel

Joe O'Brien is a 44-year-old Boston police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, a proud father of four children in their 20s, and a respected, seasoned law enforcement officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements.

Happiness for Beginners

A year after getting divorced, Helen Carpenter, thirty-two, lets her annoying younger brother talk her into signing up for a wilderness survival course. It's supposed to be a chance for her to pull herself together again, but when she discovers that her brother's even more annoying best friend is also coming on the trip, she can't imagine how it will be anything other than a disaster. Thus begins the strangest adventure of Helen's well-behaved life.

The Grown Ups: A Novel

Spanning over a decade, told in alternating voices, The Grown Ups explores the indelible bonds of friends and family and the connections that form between Sam, Suzie, and Bella as they navigate parents, siblings, and one another on the way to becoming who they really want to be when they grow up.

I Take You: A Novel

Meet Lily Wilder - New Yorker, lawyer, and bride-to-be. She has a dream job, great friends, a family full of charismatic and loving women, and a total catch of a fiancé. Also? She has no business getting married.

Funny Girl: A Novel

Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingnue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest does what he does best: endears us to a cast of characters who are funny if flawed, and forces us to examine ourselves in the process.

One Step Too Far: A Novel

A happy marriage. A beautiful family. A lovely home. So what makes Emily Coleman get up one morning and walk right out of her life to start again as someone new? Now Emily has become Cat, working at a hip advertising agency in London and living on the edge with her inseparable new friend, Angel. Cat's buried any trace of her old self so well, no one knows how to find her. But she can't bury the past or her own memories.

Publisher's Summary

In terms of style, wit, and irony, there is no comparison between Peyton Place and Joe Goffman's Bush Falls. But both books stripped away the facade of small-town propriety to reveal the private, indecorous, and unseemly doings underneath. Joe Goffman was fifteen years out from his sleepy hometown when he wrote Bush Falls, a searing critique of its people and institutions. The book was a runaway best seller, and led to an even more successful movie. Now, however, Joe's got a problem. His father has suffered a stroke, and that means that Joe has to go back to his birthplace after having successfully antagonized every person living there. Can Joe survive the reservoirs of hatred that have been waiting to pour down upon him? Just maybe.

What the Critics Say

"A beautifully crafted book of enormous heart, humility, wit, honesty, and vulnerability. You want to call your friends at 3 a.m. and read whole passages out loud. You want to press it into the hands of strangers. You cannot stop thinking about it because it has rearranged your very molecules. You know that kind of book? This is that kind of book. The Book of Joe is utterly magnificent. I wish I'd written it myself. "(Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors) "[Tropper] does it with wit, insight, and a lot of fun cultural references." (Booklist) "The Book of Joe is an elegiac, wickedly observant look at a small town and its secrets. In Jonathan Tropper's highly readable novel, the problem isn't that you can't go home again, it's that eventually you have to, whether you like it or not." (Tom Perrotta, author of Election and Joe College)

I wasn't really sure what to expect when I chose this title - I actually was drawn to it initatilly because Scott Brick is the reader and he has always done a good job on other books I've listened to. This is no exception - his reading brings the book alive.
But I also found myself fully engaged in the story and characters - I laughed out loud too many time to count, and felt moved to tears at other times. Throughout the reading I tried imagining Joe, and I could see John Cusack playing him if it was a movie - kind of a quirky smart aleck but trying to do the right thing.
There is one unfortunate sexual scene that I thought was unnecessary and unrealistic - probably what a previous reviewer meant when she described this as a boy's book. But it was just one scene and not enough to condemn the whole story. Ultimately I'm glad I took the chance on this book.

The themes of acceptance, responsibility, and letting go of the past are more related to lifestage than gender, and I found this a well-written treatment of them. I found myself unusally touched by dreadfully painful things that happen to the characters, particularly the young ones. The characters are well drawn, and rarely one-dimensional. All in all, I found it an absorbing listen with a nice balance of humor and poignancy.

Jonathan Tropper’s ability to make you feel like his best friend is what makes his books so enjoyable. His writing is easy, believable and natural.

The protagonist Joe Goffman had a difficult time in high school. He was seen as a loser and his friends were no better. There were three important people in his life back then, Carly, the girl he loved, Wayne and Sammy, his two best friends who went through their own hell. Joe’s tumultuous high school years left him angry and bitter.

After high school, he chose to leave his small town of Bush Falls. More as a cathartic exercise with no expectations, Joe wrote a book dissing every one who ever crossed him back home. Never in his wildest dreams did he think his book would become a best seller. Then came the call. His father had a stroke and after 15 years Joe would have to return home and face all the people he had maligned so publicly, and each one wanted a piece of him.

Tropper managed to create believable, rich characters. Disguised by humor, Tropper deals with difficult topics such as bullying, coming out, aids, family relationships and the frustrations and scars of growing up as the underdog.

The Book of Joe was one of those stories I was sorry to see end. Looks like there is a film in development too.

I LOVED this audiobook and have listened to it many times. Well reminiscent for those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, with Springsteen references an added bonus -- and for those of us still trying to "grow up" in various ways. The storyline, however, is reflective of things still going on today and still very pertinent. Very well presented, also. Did not find it shallow as suggested by a previous reviewer, although can see where that idea might grab one --but this is a character who is trying to be shallow to aid living in denial, but just can't carry it off because the truth keeps staring him down. Great on all points.

If you are offended by naughty language, hot sex or real people with real pain, this isn't the book for you. But for the rest of us, this is one of the best books of all time. However, it is very important to get the unabridged version. I have heard both and the unabridged beats the abridged every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Every once in a while I come across a book I wish I had written. This is one of those books. The story is so engaging; the characters are memorable and the writing is just plain great. Add to that the great narration- this is a winner.I recommended this book to several of my friends, all of whom agreed with me. Lest you think this is a "guy's" book or the male version of "chick-lit", let me add that I am female and 20 years older than the characters in the book. I subsequently listened to "Everything Changes" also great. And read Plan B, Tropper's first book. I am just delighted to find such a fresh new talent at the beginning of his writing career and hope there are many more novels in his future.

This is the second Tropper book I have listened to, and I haven't been let down yet. I love the quirky, early 30's characters that somehow can't help but mess up most of the things in their lives. I guess it is therapy for me - I don't seem half as messed up as I thought I was after reading about Joe's life! If you get this book, be ready to laugh out loud one minute, then be near tears the next. He goes through some tough subject matter, but in a way that doesn't seem too presumptuous or overwhelming. The characters deal with things the best they know how, and it makes for a very interesting story! Try it out!

Where does The Book of Joe rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Among the very best that I've ever read, both in print (which I read first) and in audio. Like many other people, I discovered Jonathan Tropper through This Is Where I Leave You and faithfully moved along with him with the follow-up, One Last Thing Before I Go. I went back and read his entire back catalog, also listening to many of them in audio format.

His second novel, The Book of Joe, is the real gem, in my opinion, establishing the formula of a relationship-challenged self-effacing protagonist going back to his roots to face his sick, dying or dead father, rival brother, and long-ago first love, along with various and sundry other characters. All to great comic effect.

What sets this one apart is its framing device: Joe left home and became a literary success writing a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel about his hometown, and now he has to come back and face all the people he wrote about, not necessarily in a flattering way. The results are hilarious -- the opposite of the dark and violent Banshee, the stage-setter for Tropper's light and comic novels.

What other book might you compare The Book of Joe to and why?

The book compares so closely to its successors in the Tropper library, his next four books being riffs on similar topics, although his protagonists age along with the author, going from being young single men to married men to divorced men. But the title asks us to compare this story to the biblical Book of Job, as well as the parable of the prodigal son, Joe leaving home and returning like the latter, and suffering tests of faith like the former.

Have you listened to any of Scott Brick’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Scott Brick is one of the most prolific audiobook narrators. Not being one to choose books based on narrator, I have nevertheless listened to about a half dozen of his books across a number of different authors. There is a reason he is so much in demand -- he is one of the most reliable voices of audiobooks, no exception here. He is also fighting cancer of the throat, an irony for someone who relies so much on his voice. But he is so far winning that fight -- here's wishing the best to one of the best.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

I could go with the title to this review, with word play similar to what Tropper does with The Book of Job -- "The Prodigal Sonny Returns" -- the parable of the prodigal son being as apropos to this story as that of Job. Or how about, "You really can go home again -- if you don't mind messing everything up first." Unfortunately, the book has gone through a couple of production cycles and has so far not made it onto the big screen.

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